Smarter Kids at 10 Bucks a PopStephen J. Dubner04/08/2011 | 10:01 am

Share

A primary school student with glasses from theGansu Vision Intervention Project in Gansu,China. (Photo: Albert Park)

Our latest episode of Freakonomics Radio (you can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live viathe link in box at right below, or read the transcript here) is about education reform — sort of. Most ed reformaddresses the supply side of the equation. That is, what should teachers and schools be doing differently? But thisstory is about the demand side, the students themselves. What if there were a cheap, quick, and simple way to liftsome students’ grades?

That’s the question that drove two economists, Paul Glewwe at the University of Minnesota and Albert Park atOxford, to conduct an experiment in a poor, rural province of China called Gansu. (You may remember reading aboutrecent landslides there, which killed more than 1,000 people.)

The paper that Glewwe and Park wrote, with co-author Meng Zhao, is called “The Impact of Eyeglasses on theAcademic Performance of Primary School Students: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Rural China.”

Albert Park with students Guan Guopan and LongNan at Datong Township No. 1 Jr. H.S. (Photocourtesy Albert Park)

Glewwe and Park learned that, while 10 to 15 percent of the young students in Gansu had vision problems that couldbe corrected with eyeglasses, only two percent of the kids who needed glasses actually had them. So, working withlocal health officials, they set up an experimental program to get free glasses to kids who needed them, while alsoestablishing a control group of kids who needed glasses but, at least during this experimental phase, wouldn’t getglasses.

Albert Park with students Guan Guopan and LongNan at Datong Township No. 1 Jr. H.S. (Photocourtesy Albert Park)

Glewwe and Park learned that, while 10 to 15 percent of the young students in Gansu had vision problems that couldbe corrected with eyeglasses, only two percent of the kids who needed glasses actually had them. So, working withlocal health officials, they set up an experimental program to get free glasses to kids who needed them, while alsoestablishing a control group of kids who needed glasses but, at least during this experimental phase, wouldn’t getglasses.

In the podcast, you’ll hear about a) how effective the glasses were in raising test scores; b) the surprising fact thatthe take-up rate for the free glasses was relatively low, and possible explanations for this; c) how this interventioncompares in efficiency and cost to the typical ed-reform interventions taking places around the world.

Paul Glewwe with a happilybespectacled primary-school student.(Photo: Albert Park.)

You will also hear how curious it is that many poor schoolkids in China (and/or their parents) wouldn’t accept freeglasses that would help them see better while many Americans spend hundreds of dollars for eyeglasses with clear-plastic lenses, which don’t help them see better at all but do help them look better. The main talker in that section isHarvey Moscot, an optometrist and president (and fourth-generation member) of the legendary New York eyewearshop MOSCOT, which happens to run its own eyeglasses program for needy kids, called the Moscot MobileyesFoundation Inc.

Here are a few excerpts from the podcast. First, Glewwe on how hard it is to isolate inputs that really move theneedle in education:

GLEWWE: There’s nothing that comes through really strongly across a variety of countries or contexts,like ‘oh, this is the thing that matters.’ Like, you know, the level of the teacher’s education — sometimesthat matters, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s quite frustrating, actually, to try to understand what’s going on. It’spretty clear that it’s complicated. And some people would say what really matters is sort of the incentivefor all the people involved. If everyone has the right incentive, then learning will take place. But eventhat, I did some research in Kenya where we tried to give teachers prizes for having kids with higher testscores, and it didn’t work very well. So, we’re still trying to learn a lot, and there’s a lot of people doingresearch on this topic, but we still have a lot to learn.

Freakonomics Radio

“Smarter Kids at 10 Bucks a Pop”: It won’t work for everyone, but there’s a cheap, quick, and simple wayto lift some students’ grades.

Download/Subscribe at iTunes »Subscribe to RSS feed

research on this topic, but we still have a lot to learn.

Freakonomics Radio

“Smarter Kids at 10 Bucks a Pop”: It won’t work for everyone, but there’s a cheap, quick, and simple wayto lift some students’ grades.

Download/Subscribe at iTunes »Subscribe to RSS feed

Listen Now

Park on how this project was different, and important:

PARK: I think that a lot of the people going around trying to think about how can we improve educationand learning tend to focus on how we can improve schools, and teachers, textbooks, et cetera. And thisproblem is a little bit different, because it’s really about the behavior of students and their parents.Sometimes those get simply overlooked in people trying to find solutions. … And I think there’s a wholearea of future potential to think more about the behavior of students. … [I]n China, the biggest payoff isactually getting into college, because there is a huge return to higher education. … So, undereducatedyouth are increasingly disadvantaged.

MOSCOT glasses "TheNebb": is $255 is a smallprice to pay to look"cool"?

And Moscot on why Chinese kids might refuse glasses whereas in the U.S., it’s estimated that some four millionpeople wear “planos” (glasses with non-prescription lenses):

MOSCOT: It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t think the fashion aspect of eye wear in China has taken placelike it has in America. Famous Chinese icons probably are not wearing their glasses like they are inAmerica. In America, eyeglasses are the coolest thing you can put on your face right now. From anyhip-hop star to any idol of a sports star that wears them when they’re not playing their sports influenceschildren’s perception of eyeglasses.

Hyman Moscot in front of the Moscot store on Rivington Street in 1934. (Photo: MOSCOT)